For a preter with heightened senses, it might as well be a siren.
The turbulence passes.
He lets go.
“Careful,” he says. That’s all. One word. And then he’s back to his tablet, and I’m left looking down at the place on my wrist where his fingers were, where the skin is still tingling, where I can still feel the ghost of his grip like a brand.
I pick up my water.
I take a sip.
My hand is not shaking.
My hand is categorically, definitively not shaking.
I set the water down and pick up my tablet and pull up the V-Series specs because if I don’t find something concrete to do in the next five seconds, it’s going to replay the sensation of his fingers on my wrist on a continuous loop until I lose what’s left of my sanity.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
His skin was warm. Not just normal-person warm. Warm like a furnace banked low, slow and constant.
Polymer composition. Tensile strength. UV resistance ratings.
I wonder if all preters run hot or if it’s just him. I wonder if it’s a stallion shifter thing. I wonder if his whole body is that warm, and then I immediately stop wondering because that line of inquiry leads nowhere appropriate.
I read about polymers. I read about polymers very, very intently.
But underneath the reading, underneath the specs and the technical language and the safe, solid world of product design, there is a question forming. A question I don’t want to askbecause asking it means admitting that I’m feeling something I swore I would never feel again.
Is it just me?
Or is this...real?
He is my employer. He is royalty. He has probably forgotten more women than I will ever meet, and I’m sitting here with a racing pulse and polymer specs and the memory of his fingers on my wrist, wondering if I’ve finally lost it, like a character in one of the romance novels stacked on my windowsill.
There is nothing between us.
There is a table between us.
That’s it.
HE’S STARING AT ME.
I don’t catch it at first. I’m deep in the delegate list, cross-referencing names with the product specs Ruby loaded onto my tablet, making sure I can speak intelligently about every potential question the blue-marked names might ask. It’s the sort of focused, methodical work that usually absorbs me.
Usually.
But there’s a prickling at the back of my neck. The sensation of being watched by something you can’t see but your body knows is there. The hardwired part of my brain that remembers what it was like to be prey.
I glance up.
His eyes are on me.
Not his screen. Not the window. Me.
And for one unguarded second before he looks away, smoothly, like he wasn’t doing anything at all, I see what’s in those pale eyes, and it doesn’t fit the Prince of Atlantis reviewing a junior employee’s work readiness.
Something that looks almost like—
